Tessa Thompson delicately balancing a hawk on her arm. Michael B. Jordan holding onto a leashed husky against a backdrop of snow-capped, craggy mountains. Pregnant Beyoncé perched atop a candy apple-red car stuffed with flowers.
These are just some of the unforgettable images created by the artist Awol Erizku, an Ethiopian-American photographer, painter, filmmaker, sculptor, and DJ born in Gondar and raised in the Bronx. They’re also a mere handful of the colorful, surreal, and striking photographs included in Erizku’s first major monograph, tilted Awol Erizku: Mystic Parallax.
Published by Aperture, the book features 300 pages of Erizku’s visual works, which reference and reimagine Black contemporary culture while nodding to elements of nature and spirituality—creating a canonized version of history he calls “Afro-Esotericism.” “It’s important for me to create confident, powerful, downright regal images of Black people,” Erizku says.
